Sometimes you hear someone repeat a conspiracy theory that is obviously total nonsense — and it makes you say to yourself, "People still believe that?"
1. "Flat earth."
"I’ve truly never understood what the big conspiracy is about this — who would benefit from lying about the earth being a globe? I understand most other conspiracies and what the purpose that they would serve, but this one is so moronic it’s just beyond me. Why do they think we would be lied to about gravity?"
2. "Elvis faked his death. If he was going to do that, wouldn’t he have chosen a more dignified way to go?"
—u/jb40018
3. "Dinosaurs never existed."
4. "That JFK, Jr. didn’t die and was going to come out of hiding to be Trump’s VP."
—u/jwt0001
5. "That the Holocaust was a hoax."
"Eisenhower demanded they photograph and document it because he knew people would try to deny it happened. 'While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where [there] were piled up 20 or 30 naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"
—u/bostonwolf
6. "The moon landing. The entity with the most at stake for the US successfully landing on the moon was the USSR, who also had the ability to track the spacecraft and refute that it landed. They never said a word."
7. "Vaccines cause autism."
—u/llcucf80
8. "That the grieving families of children shot in American schools are 'crisis actors.'"
—u/InverseRatio
9. "Today I discovered that there's large groups who believe that 9/11 was CGI and there never really were any planes. Hundreds of people in an Instagram post talking about how fake it looks and it's clearly edited. Then I realized anyone under the age of 22 weren't alive for it — and if they're under 25 and they don't remember it, and any teenagers from outside of the tri-state area might not even know anyone who was there."
10. "Obama birtherism. A lot of other bonkers insane conspiracy theories are more insane in a 'supernatural insanity' sense, but they're also so far out there that you can barely apply common sense to them. What would motivate the lizard people? Who knows? They're lizard people! Whereas, let's see, a not-particularly-well-off woman living in Hawaii is pregnant — and the powers that be are somehow aware that her biracial child is someday in the future going to want to run for president."
—u/Alex_Werner
11. "Cancer has been cured and big pharma is sitting on it because it is more profitable not to cure cancer. The first problem with this is that there are multiple types of cancer. So there can't be a one size fits all cancer cure. Second is that a cancer cure would be exceedingly profitable for whatever company created it."
12. "QAnon. I mean, they made a fucking documentary series about it and outed its creators. Not only is the entire conspiracy surrounding it completely implausible, it's also so easily defeated. It's just random garbage with a thousand predictions that haven't come true. Just give it up already. Even most doomsday cults give up after four or five faulty predictions."
—u/Noobeaterz
13. "Chemtrails."
"I met someone who was into chemtrails — they thought everything was lithium poisoning and that the colors of the sunset was lithium in the atmosphere. They had a good hot dog stand, though."
14. "Jet fuel is a hoax and airliners run on compressed air."
—u/Amberskin
15. "The earth is five thousand years old."
—u/cblume
16. "The 2020 election was stolen."
—u/prodigy1367
17. "One I see sometimes as a math major, is that 0.999...does not equal 1 in the Real numbers. There are some math quacks out there who adamantly insist, no matter how you prove it to them otherwise, that 0.999...and 1 aren't just two ways of writing the same number."
—u/bodyknock
18. "Charles de Gaulle was King Charles's biological father."
—u/joecoin2
19. "The Titanic switch. I still have a hard time understanding how there are people that genuinely believe that shit."
And finally...
20. "The republican party is fiscally conservative and believes in small government."
—u/Psychogopher